


It's a Funny Story...

by SunshineAndRainbows



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alien Culture, Altea - Freeform, Canon Compliant, Character Study, Gen, Homesickness, Humans are Aliens, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, Implied/Referenced Minor Character Death, Original paladins - Freeform, coran coran the family man, exploring a headcanon i have, lion telepathy, not canon compliant as of season 3
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-27
Updated: 2017-06-27
Packaged: 2018-11-19 16:14:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,513
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11317014
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SunshineAndRainbows/pseuds/SunshineAndRainbows
Summary: The funny thing about Earth was that human history didn’t reach back ten thousand years. Oh there was evidence of life back then, but even the most ancient of humanity’s historical records never quite went back far enough.





	It's a Funny Story...

The funny thing about space wasn’t particularly funny at all.

The funny thing about space was how utterly unfamiliar every piece of it felt. The places were—pun intended—entirely alien, and the aliens themselves were even more so.

Shiro had always adored the idea of cultures: how groups of people could come together and build something so unique and personal, but still to be shared and admired. How every generation afterwards would be formed by that culture, but then go on to redefine it and make it their own, only to pass it on, again in again, in the most fantastic relay race Shiro had ever fathomed.

In the Galra prisons, every individual person he met was their own story, and each and every story had entire planets full of context. How they lived, how they died. Shiro had met aliens who believed that being put in the arena and being allowed to die fighting was the Galra’s last act of mercy, and aliens who recited dozens of memorized prayers until they collapsed into sleep. He’d been the alien who recited the names of everyone he loved every day, because he felt so wrapped up and strangled in the act of surviving that he was starting to fear he’d never remember anything else. They talked about it sometimes. What home was like, why they did the small things they did.

On good days, it was almost thrilling. On bad days, at least it provided some distraction.

He liked to think he even made some friends.

(Sometimes they disappeared. Sometimes his list of names grew longer.)

The funny thing about space was how infinitely vast and infinitely diverse it was. Shiro had met aliens with dozens more limbs than anything on planet Earth and people whose bodies were formed from impossible materials.

(Shiro wanted to laugh; humanity had spent countless years looking for _water_ on other planets, looking for life, but only on planets with qualities that could support _Earth_ -life. If only they’d had a little more imagination.)

There were people every color of the rainbow (literally) and then some (again, literally, and Shiro would never not feel cheated by how few color receptors his eyes actually had).

Even though Shiro’s experience in space was limited by cell walls and a pit to fight in until he died in it, it was impossible to not notice that the only people like him he’d ever seen—the only people whose bodies were shaped like his, and made out of carbon and water like his, and colored in keratin brown like his—the only other humanoids in all of space were the two humans he had brought with him.

So really, the funny thing about space was that, of all the different kinds of people from all the different planets all across the impossibly vast galaxy, the two aliens he ended up teaming up with were the two most human-looking aliens he’d ever seen.

 

* * *

 

 

When Keith had first found the lion drawings on the cave walls, he had tried his hardest to research them. Hours, days, weeks poured out in the public library of the nearest town, finding everything he could on every remotely related topic. He started with blue lions in the local area’s ancient mythology, devolved into lions in worldwide mythology (and a tangent into why/how areas that reasonably would never have seen a native lion still had myths involving lionoid creatures). He trailed through the ancient history of the area and after a month of nothing he finally resorted to the keywords “cave paintings.”

Keith could write a research paper on cave paintings. He could write a dissertation on cave paintings. His title would be “cave dwellers’ garbage art style” and his thesis would be “this was a waste of time. I officially threw away all of my dreams for the future a couple months ago but this was still a waste of time.”

Keith usually took care to write cohesively, but Shiro was _dead_ and he didn’t have a single thing left to do with the rest of his life but _search_ , and figure out the story of a giant blue cat and he was _still_ wasting time. So after spending an entire day researching cave paintings and learning nothing related to the ones he found, he let himself hate the pictures of stick figures and the lopsided cows just a little bit.

It wasn’t like he had any teachers to worry about giving a shitty paper to anymore anyways.

He finally resolved to try figuring out the cave paintings the old-fashioned way. Keith got a camera and meticulously documented every drawing he could find. There were dozens of caves and each one held its own set of drawings that told a different story. The blue lion was present in all of them.

He printed up the three best photos of the blue lion and tacked them to his cork board, but the drawing that stuck out in his mind, the first one he had found, stayed on his camera roll. It was simple, just a group of stick figures standing in front of the lion, but when he remembered it, months later, lightyears farther, he couldn’t help but wonder what ancient humans must have thought—seeing a colossal mechanical lion come down from the heavens and a single mysterious entity leave it.

How had the original blue paladin reacted to the group of curious humans? If the old blue paladin was anything like Lance… how would Lance have reacted? How did the ancient humans actually react? Were they curious? Confused? Scared? Did they attack out of fear or run and hide? Was the blue paladin welcomed? Keith hoped they were, because it seemed likely that the blue paladin spent the rest of their life on Earth, and if they were anything like Lance, they would have needed the social support.

So many questions, but so few answers, because the funny thing about Earth was that human history didn’t reach back ten thousand years. Oh there was evidence of life back then, but even the most ancient of humanity’s historical records never quite went back far enough. The closest thing to an immortalized record of humanity’s reaction to the blue lion was a bad stick figure drawing of a group standing in front of her.

Keith sometimes wondered if he had misinterpreted the drawing, because the exact numbers… there were seventeen people, fifteen small, two tall, and every painting that involved people had the same. Seventeen people standing in front of the lion, seventeen people, again and again. Seventeen people, one lying down, then sixteen people. The small ones became tall. New tiny ones appeared. The last tall one died. The last drawing was funeral in front of the blue lion, then the rest left.

The more Keith thought about it, the less he believed that the stick figures were humans after all, but he still wondered how early humans had reacted to the literal alien immigrants. Months of research, following every lead he could find, had given him nothing. No human history was old enough to remember a blue lion coming to Earth, and the Altean cave paintings almost seemed to suggest they had never met any locals.

The funny thing about Earth was that it never seemed to hold the answers to Keith’s questions. He was pretty excited to be looking someplace else.

 

* * *

 

The funny thing about Alteans, pointy ears and shapeshifting aside, was how utterly familiar they were. While they surely would have attracted some stares, Pidge felt absolutely certain that Coran and Allura could have walked down the street on Earth and not a single soul would suspect they were not human.

Weirdly dedicated cosplayers, maybe, but never aliens. They were human shaped and human colored and they sounded human and acted human. Pidge could count the differences on her fingers, but the similarities didn’t seem to stop, and that just didn’t add up.

Allura and Coran were experienced diplomats. They had a standard procedure all planned out for when they met a new species (granted, they forgot to go through with it until _after_ Lance had been nearly killed). There were thorough medical tests to see how human biology worked, how anatomy put everything together, tests to see which medications would work and how, tests to see what humans needed nutritionally, tests to see what common allergies humans might have (or not have). With a couple negligible exceptions, humans tested exactly like Alteans.

There was one brand of Altean painkiller that would theoretically get them high as well as numb their pain and the Tylenol in Keith’s fanny pack would, theoretically, do the same to the Alteans.

Humans and Alteans had the exact same nutritional needs, although they seem to have adapted different methods to acquiring those nutrients. While Alteans _could_ eat meat, their default diet was practically vegan, whereas humans were more solidly omnivorous, and had the teeth to match. It was almost unsettling to look at Allura’s smile and see smooth lines of teeth, uninterrupted by canines. Pidge theorized that the difference in dietary preference could have been caused by a difference in food availability on their respective planets. Pidge had had a vegan friend or two before the garrison, and they had always been sure to tell her repeatedly that they had to take great care in their diet to be sure they were eating enough protein to make up for what they lost in meat. Perhaps Altea had more protein-rich plants, plus from what Pidge had experienced regarding their fauna, hunting might have been a much harder task there than on Earth—but she was getting off topic.

They didn’t have much of a difference in allergies, although apparently lactose tolerance was not a common trait. It wasn’t entirely unheard of to the Alteans, but still rare.

~*~*~*~

Pidge had noticed, when they visited planets, even the fittest natives often had difficulty keeping up with them. She mentioned it once. Coran declared that back in the good old days, Alteans had been well known for being hardy little buggers. Their strength and speed generally fell to the high side of average, but across the galaxy they were unmatched in endurance.

“But… we have no problem keeping up with you.” Keith pointed out

“Dude, speak for yourself.” Hunk groaned.

Coran had gone oddly quiet. When Pidge looked back at him he was watching Keith and Hunk’s continued banter with a thoughtful, almost wistful expression that Pidge had no idea what to make of.

~*~*~*~

There’s a reason humans never called themselves Earthlings like the rest of the galaxy seems to, because, ultimately, Pidge was as much of an Earthling as her dog Gunther. Technically the yelmores Coran often spoke of and the juniberry plants Allura loved were also Altean (even then, Coran and Allura were still the last). On the other hand, Pidge believed with all her heart that as much as Keith was half Galra, he was still 100% Earthling, and he would always have a place wherever she called home.

The funny thing about humans is that the word “human” comes from Latin’s “homo, hominis” meaning “same.”

As in, once upon a time a Roman had looked at another Roman and said “Look at us! We’re the same!”

And that Roman saw a Gaul and said “We’re the same!”

And the Gaul found another person and another person until eventually someone decided to make a word out of it.

Pidge knew that Allura and Coran weren’t Earthlings, but sometimes she wondered; if that ancient Roman had ever met them, would he have called them human too?

 

* * *

 

 

The funny thing about Lance was that he wanted, dearly, deeply, desperately, to go home. He wasn’t about to abandon Voltron, but there was no point in lying; he really wanted his home.

The funny thing about Blue was that she really wanted to go home too.

It wasn’t like they talked, really. Their communication usually involved very little talking.

But once upon a time, Lance was hiding away in Blue’s bay and feeling the need for home hook in his chest and wring itself around his neck, cutting off his breath.

And Blue didn’t speak, but she said “Me too.”

On a whim, Lance asked her out loud, “Where is home for you?”

Blue didn’t answer, but she seemed to reflect the question back to him.

Lance didn’t answer right away, and not out loud, but he told her that that home was his mom and dad and entire hoard of cousins, any of whom he was pretty sure he would die for if it came to it. It could have been the beach he was raised on, but really it was the memories he made there. It was his Grandma who taught him how to knit, and his Grandpa who taught him the stories of the constellations and hadn’t lived long enough to see him graduate flight school.

And Blue didn’t speak, but she said “Me too.”

Blue focused on his Grandpa—the loss that still felt fresh even two years later, because he had been home but now was gone forever.

And Blue didn’t speak, but she said “Me too.”

She didn’t tell him the story, but fed the ideas to him. Ideas of a person who had to leave their planet forever, but couldn’t bear to leave their home behind, so they brought it with them. So the little Altean gathered as many people as they could fit.

Blue was the second or third largest lion, so she had lots of space, but never ever enough. Maybe Fourteen, sitting close together, but her little Altean brought small children and took seventeen anyways.

Blue was the one to steer away from Altea as it fell. Her paladin couldn’t bear to.

Blue showed Lance the long trip away, ceaselessly fleeing for almost an eternity, and she showed him how her pilot’s homesickness for the people they’d been unable to bring had felt to her.

She imagined to him the feeling of finding a planet to finally stop on, as food was running out. Landing. Hiding.

Lance asked how the early humans had treated her.

She said there were no early humans.

Earth had been fine, because her pilot had stayed with her the rest of their life, and even after. When her little Altean ran out of years, the home they had brought with them buried them in the cave with Blue.

She hesitated, then gently, through as many layers of ancient memory and secondhand emotion as possible, she showed him what it had felt like when the bond had left.

It hadn’t snapped, hadn’t crumbled. It had done nothing but disappear. It was nothing more than the feeling of her paladin being alive one moment, and not the next. Despite her shielding, Lance felt burning tears start to form.

The Alteans who had come to Earth left her alone after her paladin had died. She didn’t care where they went and didn’t care when they came back generations later, in great numbers, looking less Altean than ever.

She didn’t care for an eternity, until she remembered she had more people to call home—these ones metal and magic and undying and still waiting for her—so she started looking for him.

The funny thing about the blue lion was that she was the right leg: the first foot forward, the first step into adventure, away from Altea, away from Earth, away from home. But however brave she was, however boldly she went, she always, always, always wanted her home.

The funny thing about the first blue paladin was that they somehow managed to take their home with them.

The funny thing about Lance was that, given the chance, he thought he might do the same.

 

* * *

 

 

The funny thing about the lions was that they were lions. Like. Normal Earth-lions. Normal Earth-lions if normal Earth-lions were mechanical and came in all different colors of the rainbow and could fuse into some sort of mech guy. So they weren’t like, totally lions, but of all the creatures in the universe to be mostly reminiscent of and also named after? The statistic improbability of it was so impossibly huge that it hurt Hunk’s brain to think about it.

As far as he knew, the robot lions were built very far away from Earth and its fleshy lions, but what are the chances that an ancient civilization would build robots in the image of a creature they couldn’t possibly know about?

Did Alteans have lions of their own that inspired the Voltron lions? But if so, how could Earth have a species that was so coincidentally similar to the Voltron lions that they even shared a name?

Were lions a universal constant? Did every planet have lions? King of the jungle? More like king of the universe. Hell yeah, Simba-ltron overthrow your evil uncle-ror Scar-kon.

Was it possibly some quirk of whatever space-agey translator that had aliens speaking English? Most animal names didn’t translate though, so why would lions be the exception? Maybe because Keith had identified the blue lion as a lion, the translators assumed that “Lion” was just the English word for the type of creature the Voltron lions actually were.

Maybe “Earth-lions” were actually aliens all along. Maybe the original blue paladin was literally a lion. Or maybe more likely, maybe the original blue paladin had had pet lions that they brought to Earth with them, and then those lions became the common ancestors to all the lions on Earth… that still seemed unlikely.

Maybe when the original blue paladin dropped down on Earth they had explored a bit and when they found Earth-lions they named the cats after Voltron.

And if Hunk were to be frank—which he usually tried to be—the funny thing was that, of all things, they were _lions_. If someone had asked him a year ago which Earth animal it was that secretly had some sort of conspiracy-ties to aliens, he would never in his life have guessed lions. Maybe platypi, or even cuttlefish, but _lions_? _Really_?

 

* * *

 

 

The funny thing about the cryopods was the side effects. For the most part—Allura’s new mental link with her mice notwithstanding—they were extremely minor and short-lived. The most common effect was disorientation and exhaustion immediately upon exit. Coran swore the cold messed up his joints, but even that was temporary and could be fixed by time and stretching.

When Allura fell out of the pod after ten thousand years, she could have sworn she was caught by an Altean man with the ugliest ears she’d ever seen.

She told him as much.

Tactless, yes, but extremely common for people to blather a bit after waking up; it couldn’t be held against her.

All the same, it was odd, and a fairly amusing coincidence that the alien that caught her when she woke up looked so uncannily Altean that she—a princess who had spent her entire life amongst aliens and other Alteans and should surely have been able to tell the difference between her own species and another—had assumed he was Altean.

(She learned later, much later, that Coran had made the same mistake, but assumed enemy fighter. Not all Alteans had sided with Altea, and Zarkon would never have allowed an Altean to survive that wasn’t exclusively loyal to him.)

The funny thing about the cryopods is that for all that they are a miracle of Altean medicine, they hold the potential to be extraordinarily dangerous. When Allura had been taught about them, her tutor had given an example: imagine if you took a Bytor, and stuck them in a healing pod that was designed to magically restore an injured Altean to peak Altean health. Bytors’ anatomy is entirely different from Alteans, it would be effectively impossible to transform a Bytor body into a functional Altean body; the cryopods used magic to encourage the body to heal to certain standards, they didn’t transmute a sick body into a healthy one. Taking an injured Bytor and trying to “heal” it into an Altean would likely kill them; they would be stuck in a body designed to work one way and forced into halfway working a different way. It would be a gruesome way to die, certainly.

Fortunately, that was only a theoretical situation. The inventor of the cryopod predicted such a risk and programmed dozens of failsafes, so such a thing could never come to pass. There were multiple redundancies, just in case, so that even if one failsafe glitched, the system was altogether more likely to break down than accidently heal someone on the wrong setting.

The process was simple, and largely automated. One would place the injured in a cryopod and turn it on. The cryopod would scan the injured and—if their species was in the databanks—automatically select the correct setting and start healing them. If their species was unknown it would stop, keep the injured safely stabilized and cryogenically frozen, and write up an error report. From there the person maintaining the pods would locate a healthy member of the species (or preferably multiple), scan them to get the data the cryopod system needed, and then the cryopod would automatically resume function.

It was really standard procedure, when they met a new species, to get biometric scans and program them into the database.

But the funny thing was, they forgot.

The humans looked so Altean and everything happened so suddenly, that Allura and Coran both forgot that they were meeting a new species. They forgot to go through the procedure until it was far too late and Lance was already halfway through his cycle in the cryopod.

By all means, it should have been impossible for the pod to run, but maybe ten thousand years was what it took for the system to break down. Coran was able to determine that the cryopod was still programmed for Alteans, and that Lance still seemed to be doing well regardless, but Allura was afraid to trust that, considering that the failsafes had already failed.

They manually paused his healing and quickly gathered the other humans. Allura took biometric scans while Coran scrubbed through the system to make sure everything was back into working, automated, order.

They were all anxious to see if Lance was alright, crowded around his pod, waiting for it to open.

Then they were distracted by their “clock party.” Until he awoke, tired, hungry, and perfectly fine.

(Coran never told her, but she looked herself. The humans’ scans had all automatically been filed as some subset of Altean. Allura wasn’t sure what to make of it.)

So the funny thing was, it seemed like everything in the castle had assumed the Earthlings were Altean, but it didn’t affect them at all.

 

* * *

 

 

The funny thing about Altea was that it burned before it fell.

Alteans were diplomats first, but they never stopped being warriors, and they had plenty of allies. The battle for it was long, but they still lost. Altea was Zarkon’s first and hardest conquest; after it fell, the rest of the universe folded after it.

Coran wondered how long Zarkon had been planning his betrayal. It was organized, precise, and terribly successful. How long had Zarkon hated them without their knowledge? Had it been years? If so, how many? Had Zarkon been planning to kill them even as he joined their gathering to celebrate Allura’s birth? Had it been his plan all along?

Which was more terrible: that Zarkon had been their close friend who then decided to destroy them, or that Zarkon had been plotting their destruction all along and they had trusted him? It was impossible to weigh years and years of friendship and ultimate trust against the loss of Altea, but in quiet moments, Coran still found himself trying to reconcile it all.

Zarkon had saved planets, sometimes singlehandedly.

Zarkon destroyed planets. Destroyed homes. Lives.

The funny thing is, the fight for Altea was long—long enough to send away hundreds of ships full of escaping civilians.

Coran had personally watched all too many of those shot out of the sky.

He still hoped, an agonizing, desperate hope that he’d never wish on another soul, that even one ship had made it out. He hoped that even one ship full of Alteans had survived, maybe found a new home and thrived, far away from Zarkon. He dreamed that his own family could have been among them. His son would have been far too young to remember him, but maybe his daughter could have told him stories about Coran, and explained that he wasn’t there because he had stayed behind to fight Zarkon, to try and make the universe safe for them to grow up in. Coran liked to imagine that they would miss him, but ultimately forgive him.

He liked to imagine, but no amount of dreaming could ever erase from his mind the sight of their ship being hit by enemy fire, tipping over backwards, and drifting like a feather back to the ground. He had felt as though if only he could run fast enough he could have caught the ship in his own hands, but he was frozen in his skin, and only watched as it collapsed in a great ball of fire.

But Coran liked to imagine.

He liked to hope, even though he knew that as soon as Zarkon was done with Altea he would hunt down any ship that escaped. Coran liked to dream, even though he knew there was no place in the known universe that would be safe for long.

Every time he saw the humans, he couldn’t help but wonder. They lacked the under-eye markings, pointed ears, and the ability to shapeshift, and instead had a couple pairs of sharp, carnivore’s teeth and a propensity for drinking milk. All things considered, those were such minor differences. Really, in ten thousand years, why couldn’t a race evolve weird ears, weird teeth, and a weird taste in food? Most of the differences were largely cosmetic, and apparently not all humans were “lactose tolerant.” Altea may have survived, if only in a small legacy, and how funny would it be if it was closer than they thought?

Keith once mentioned that human history didn’t reach far enough back to remember the blue lion’s arrival, but Coran knew the blue paladin; they would have loathed to leave their loved ones behind.

Coran liked to imagine, to hope. The universe was already dark, Allura needed a bright person to guide her. The paladins did too. And maybe it was silly, but if imagining he was seeing his daughter’s smile on Keith’s face in the quiet, happy moments, if wondering if his son would have grown up to be more like Hunk or Lance, if those impossible dreams could help him face the day… well, wouldn’t it be funny if they came true?

**Author's Note:**

> ta daaaa!  
> my first published work  
> I hope I made it obvious in writing, but the headcanon I have is basically that, when forced to flee Altea, the original blue paladin brought a lionfull of Alteans over to an unpopulated earth. Add ten thousand years of microevolution and genetic continuance and bam! You have the human race.


End file.
